


let there be fire

by LocketShoru



Series: Aeternum -Iridescence- [6]
Category: Saint Seiya, 聖闘士星矢: 冥王神話 | Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Anthropomorphic, Aries Shion's POV, Grimdark, M/M, Saint Seiya Rarepair Week 2020, Survival, mild violence, no beta we die like gold saints
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 05:41:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26966872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LocketShoru/pseuds/LocketShoru
Summary: [Day 8: Free Day] Kardia is still on the loose, and he poses a threat that isn't so easily solved by killing the man in charge. Aiacos and Shion discuss strategy.
Relationships: Garuda Aiacos/Aries Shion
Series: Aeternum -Iridescence- [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1596289
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2
Collections: Saint Seiya Rarepair Week 2020





	let there be fire

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written for Aeternum in quite a while, and there's a reason for that. When I first wrote it, it was on the tail-end of NaNoWriMo last year, I was wheelchair-bound due to a broken leg and there was snow and I was starry-eyed for my major. I have since realized my worldbuilding was super shaky, and I didn't start where I should have.  
> So I've been on a bit of a hiatus, and when I come back to this series, it's probably going to be redoing it entirely. I love Aeternum, don't get me wrong, and I enjoy the bragging rights of being, as far as I know, the only one in this fandom to have written post-apocalyptic. But I do need to rework my premise a bit, so Aeternum will probably stay on hiatus until I have that all worked out and can restart.  
> For now, have a short chapter about these two idiots. This chapter is partially dedicated for Calaerwen, who translated the last Aiacos/Shion fic for me and deserves the gratitude by way of more writing.
> 
> Lastly, I do want to note that I will probably not be writing more fic until at the very earliest December, for reasons of NaNoWriMo. This week has been really fun, and a lot of work, but NaNo deserves focus, as always. So I'll see y'all then!

The problem started and ended with three words. The Scorpio Ravagers. Shion was not a stupid man, he knew the cruelty of them as well as he knew his own. The Scorpios had claimed almost all of ground zero and quite a bit under it. Military bunkers and underground parking lots - quite possibly the safest, and easiest-defensible places to live - were their home territory. They moved quickly and quietly, appearing underneath any settlement that was attempting to survive and conquer.

There was no way to get under them, and there was little they could not attack from below. His hands worked quickly against the metal limb, rewiring the magnets into position until the vehicle was operational. All it needed was power, and it would run. They needed to salvage as many of them as they could.

Elcid rose from his position, his hooves striking ground with the metallic clanking that he had long since gotten used to. "Sir. We have enough vehicles in working condition to return to base."

"Do they have power?" Power was a constant problem. They had a generator back at their nearest camp to keep them running, but it wasn't going to help here, several kilometers away. 

"One of the Garudas has a handheld generator on hand, sir. He's agreed to let us power our vehicles." Elcid's voice was clipped and neutral. He had come to expect that over the past four years they had been working together.

He had been a different man four years ago. Certainly not the leader of a ravager clan, even if his clan had just sustained heavy blows. He nodded. "Good. Charge this one up when you get a moment to, I need to speak to Aiacos before we depart."

Aiacos was the one with the monitor that would keep them alive. Shion's men had supplies with them that they had shared a little come daybreak, but it wasn't as though any of these men would be friends anytime soon. There was simply no way to do so. Every single person here was in it for their own survival. Come hell or high water, they would all be on their own.

He rose from his position and strode over to Aiacos, who was in the midst of arguing with a man who had wrapped his clothes around a solid-looking carapace. He stepped almost directly in between them, cutting them both off from their conversation.

"Are your men ready to travel?" he asked, eyeing Aiacos with his arms folded. "Mine appear ready."

"Just about," he answered, almost darkly. Aiacos' eyes narrowed, looking at him, as though he was suspicious of something. "We make first for your encampment, if the plan hasn't changed."

"We have no other choice, so yes. Your nearest encampment is another day's journey away." He looked Aiacos square in the eye, ignoring the fact that he wasn't sure if he was two feet away or ten. His depth perception wasn't the best, not now that his pupils were rectangular.

"I am aware. With such a blow, it may be best to call a truce until we can stand on our own." Aiacos looked at him with the sort of suspicion that came from a man expecting a tripwire to kill him at any moment. Shion raised his chin, noting the idea. Aiacos did not appear nervous - appearing weak was a terrible, terrible idea - but he did seem on edge. His plan did, however, hold merit.

They would be stronger with more forces, and a larger area of territory. One of them would have to be in control, and the other would handle the duties of a second-in-command. But still, there would be a kingdom, and that was better than either had been able to say alone. If he had Aiacos' forces at his own beck and call, they had half a chance of moving to the offensive against the Scorpios.

"I'll consider the idea," he answered. "For now, let's get moving. I would rather not still be here when the Scorpios come to check for any corpses to loot."

They got moving.

They didn't stop until they had reached Shion's encampment. It wasn't large - really, about a street's worth of cleared out buildings, disguised well enough that none could have found it from above, and far enough above the debris line that anyone attempting to attack from below would have to dig around to discover it. They had one underground entrance, and it was well-hidden.

At least they had no other clans coming from above. Only either side and below. Shion stopped his vehicle a few car-lengths from the first building, pulling in under an awning that was only large enough to disguise it as another part of debris. He was almost proud of that - nobody would know this was here, unless they already knew where it was.

Aiacos stopped in beside him, parking his own vehicle underneath the awning and climbing off to follow him. Shion did not turn to check that he was following properly before leading him directly to the small building that served as the general meeting area. He pushed the door open and switched on the light, stepping over to the table. 

He pressed his palms against the edge, heaving a sigh that begged for something better. There was a lot to go over.

"So," he began. "You want to call a truce and work together until we've salvaged the mess the Scorpios made of us."

"Essentially," Aiacos replied. "I've been thinking it over. I've had an idea for a while, but no means of putting it into action. The Scorpios have access to everything we have, by virtue of the fact they're ground zero, and control most of the resources that survived. Kardia rules them with an iron fist, and from what I can tell, he has a proper chain of command. We kill him, someone replaces him, and nothing changes."

"Right. And you're implying here that you actually have an idea that could stop them where they are, if we can make it feasible." Aiacos was right, painfully so. There wasn't anything they could really do to get away from the Scorpios, only disguise themselves so they would never see what was in plain sight. One wrong move, any step out from the shadows the Scorpios couldn't see, and they betrayed the entire clan.

"They don't have any long-ranged weapons." Aiacos stepped around him to drop into one of the chairs, swinging his legs up to rest his heels on the edge of the table. "They've never needed them, because they can claw their way right to anything and use something short-ranged. The only ways of beating them are to be faster, and out of reach."

"Then what are you pitching to me that's worth my consideration?" Shion demanded. "Get to the point."

Aiacos smiled, showing a row of dirty, pointed teeth. "I'm saying we can't stop them, because they're below us, and we can't cut off that point of access. Unless, of course, we can. They don't jump, they dig. We can simply ensure they can't dig upwards into us."

Shion snorted, flicking an elongated ram's ear. "You're making it sound like you want to somehow make a floating civilization."

"Is it really so unrealistic?"

He paused. The question was flat, and pointed, and made in complete seriousness. It had been done before - humanity had the starts to being a spacefaring race, and had been testing a floating civilization on Venus, shortly before the world fell down - but they had so few resources that doing so would be impossible. "And how the hell do you figure we get up into the air?"

"Theoretically, it's doable. We have quantum mechanics. We have the scattered technology, if we can retrieve it. Downtown industrial had a space centre where they were making a lot of the crafts for the Demeter missions. If we could get there, who knows? There may be enough left to work with. We don't need to get out of orbit. We just need to get off the ground and get out of reach. It isn't like oxygen will be a problem. If we've managed underground this long, and we have, then regulating aboveground shouldn't be much harder."

He thought for a moment. Most of who was still alive tended to follow the wind currents. The valley had been almost entirely sealed off from the rest of the world by a thick layer of radiation, almost like a bubble, and a solid range of impassible mountains. There had been a few highway tunnels in and out of the valley originally, but sea and sky were the more common ways of getting in and out. They were trapped until someone could break through the radiation and return to the rest of the world.

It wasn't likely. The fog was so bad that a few minutes inside it tended to kill. It was actually rather gruesome to watch. Which meant the only way of surviving long-term was to follow the winds of the self-contained weather patterns, avoiding radioactive rain and keeping to where oxygen still happened to be. They couldn't keep it up forever. There wasn't enough plantlife to restore the oxygen supply, and there was enough people that they were going to run out, sooner rather than later. He had no idea how long it was going to be before all of them were dead, incapable of escaping and suffocating to death if the radiation poisoning didn't kill them first.

"Okay, so imagine I agreed with you, hypothetically speaking," he said, finally, after a moment. "How would we go about this, combining our resources?"

Aiacos smiled again. "Well, we would make our way over to where the space centre used to be, and we would assess what they had. We would also assess what we currently have, what we can repurpose, and what we have to bring with us. We would need to power the systems, and we would need to capture food and water supplies, as well as a way of landing and taking off again. I expect we wouldn't move completely into the air, we would still have forces on the ground, but the more we move up into the air, the better our survival chances will be."

"Except, of course, for the poisonous, radioactive fog that happens to be up there, that we can't survive in and has a bad habit of melting anything thrown into it." His own voice was blunt, and unforgiving, and not at all amused with the current plan of attack.

"We would still follow the winds." Aiacos shrugged. "At the very least, even if it isn't feasible, we need to see what can be scavenged down there. I've seen the groups of people who think they can survive without us. They're not big and they don't have the knowledge to use the technology available to them. Nobody's going to be trying to work with half-finished spacecraft. From what I can, there hasn't been much in the way of Scorpio activity down there. It's half a chance better than what we currently have."

Shion sighed. "Fine. We double back to your and my headquarters to supplies, first. And we need to set up a means of communication. Then, when that's done, we'll see what we still have to work with, and we'll see about sending out a party to go scavenge up the space center."

They ended up eating together, arguing over plans and blueprints and gathering as much data from Aiacos' monitor as they could into the one working laptop Shion had in the encampment. They were working on one hell of a brutalized wide-area network, but it was functional, and they had enough to send communication from the encampment they were situated at back to where he had left his third-in-command in charge.

Aiacos' plans for an airborne civilization were remarkably well-put-together. Shion sat beside him and nitpicked some of the details, criticizing his choice in materials and offering up a better idea for insulation and keeping things airtight. 

They were interrupted by Elcid a few hours later, walking in with a smug smile and a canvas tarp wrapped into a sack over his shoulder. Shion looked up from the blueprint of an engine, scavenged off a spacecraft they had produced downtown. "What do you have to report, Elcid?"

Elcid handed him the tarp. "Another party just returned. They found a group of cultivators, eighteen total, two of which were professional weavers before. They've returned with all of their equipment intact, and fifteen prisoners intact."

Shion offered him a smile. "Excellent. Have them put somewhere and don't bother feeding them until tomorrow night. They'll be more amiable then." 

Elcid nodded, and vanished again through the door. Shion stepped to a clear spot of table and opened up the tarp. The bolts of fabric were rough, evidently outer layers of clothing meant for protection against the elements. The underside of one was colourful, scavenged from several original bolts of fabric and woven together into something closer to tie-dye than anything else. And wrapped up within the fabric…

"Hey, Aiacos, look at this," he said. Aiacos rose from his position and stepped over, eyebrows furrowed and wings settled neatly atop his back. He blinked, and began to smile again.

"Would you look at that," he remarked. "They were enough of a fool to offer us an apple branch. Bet you could graft that onto another tree and have apples all next year. I wonder what else they managed to scavenge."

Shion lifted the branch with an amount of care he didn't usually bother to take for anything but mechanics. "Well, I'll be damned. It's still flowering. If we get it grafted quickly, we could have some in a month or two. Looks like it's off to the greenhouses for the both of us, then."

Aiacos dipped his head. "I'd rather like to see what you came up with. Really, I do hate having to deal with the minutiae of keeping things running. If there's food, I don't much care where it comes from. It's food."

"See, I said that too, and then scurvy started to spread through my ranks because we weren't eating much that we hadn't stolen from cultivators. A little lemon juice in the water supply goes a long way." Shion turned to leave the room, following where Elcid had just been.

Aiacos snorted. "At this point, I'll take anything if it doesn't taste halfway rotten. If you've got a decent food supply, I might just let you board it on my airships for free."

"Ha, ha."


End file.
